Guns May Soon Be Everywhere in Georgia — Soon gun owners in the state of Georgia may be allowed to pack heat almost anywhere—including K-12 schools, bars, churches, government buildings, and airports. The “Safe Carry Protection Act” (HB 875) would also expand Georgia’s Stand Your Ground statute, the controversial law made famous by the Trayvon Martin killing, which allows armed citizens to defend themselves with deadly force if they believe they are faced with serious physical harm. What could possibly go wrong!?

Republican Family Values — A missive from the Oregon GOP. The Republican Party is proud to be known as the party of liberty. As the party of freedom, we believe that Americans should be free to live their lives as they wish, so long as they do not impede the freedom of others to do so. Therefore they support a gay marriage ban. This doesn’t pass the logic level of a fourth-grade class debate, let alone rise to the basic standards of American citizenship. Conservatives…

The Triumph Of Arrant Bullshit On The Affordable Care Act — {T]his quote is immeasurably tragic. It represents a kind of final victory for mean-spirited and uncharitable propaganda over reality, a triumph for misinformation, sabotage, and arrant bullshit in the service of a cruel ideology and faceless oligarchy.

[dreams|culture] My chemo-addled mind on pop culture

Weird have been my dreams of late. Ah medication and stress, those twinned servants of the entelechy of dreams.

Last night I didn’t just get a few postcards from my subconscious. I got a whole truckload 70mm CinemaScope reels shot on expired TechniColor film stock, complete with house posters and lobby standees. (Hmm, when I die, maybe I should continue going to conventions as a standee. Anyone want to take on carrying me around?)

At any rate, I enjoyed an hour long series of linked dream vignettes that was rather like watching Heavy Metal [ imdb ] by way of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion cycle. Sturm und drang, world-ending battles, dead peasants everywhere, myself in various guises, genders and ethnic modalities struggling to save the world over and over again, and mostly losing. All the way through, I always knew that I had lost or was going to lose. People implored me to stop.

On the plus side, my late uncle-by-marriage Big Jay McMinnis made an appearance as a Cherokee centaur. That would be Big Jay as I knew him in the early seventies, loose, wild and free, before he divorced my aunt and that bitter, judgmental form of churchiness ate his brain. The younger Big Jay would have approved. The later Big Jay would have been appalled. (And no, I was not named for him, my aunt did not even meet him until some years after I was born.)

So yeah, pop culture filter through the chemo-addled brain. Another funny bit popped up yesterday as well. Many years ago, I was a happy member of the Slug Tribe writing group in Austin, Texas. We met two Tuesdays a month in a community center conveniently located not far from my then-house. The room next door to ours was occupied by a Latin dance class. They would begin dancing to Santana’s version of “Oye Como Va”, and stop after the first few bars while (presumably) the teacher fussed at people. I have forever associated the opening of that song with delivering and receiving writing critique.

Teens taunted by bullies are more likely to consider, attempt suicide — This just in: water is wet. I know the point of stories like this is that quantifiable study results can prompt official action, but as long-time victim of childhood bullying who had a lot of suicidal ideation and one semi-serious attempt, I have ask why anyone in authority over children needs to wait for academic approval?

Oh Lordy – on the forthcoming Christian film Persecution — Basically, this is a movie in which it’s overtly asserted that in order for Christians to be “free” the government cannot endorse the idea of fairness to all religions. Indeed, it seems that liberty has now been interpreted as a requirement to officially acknowledge that America is a Christian Nation and must adhere to Christian precepts.

When an Undue Burden? — What if gun laws were written like abortion laws? Would those Constitution-loving conservatives embrace the intent of the Founders the same way? (Via Scrivener’s Error.)

Journalists should stop ‘balancing’ stories with Science Denialists: Cosmos’s Neil DeGrasse Tyson — Either that or go all the way. Every time a story runs about a weather satellite, a Flat Earth denialist should get equal time. It would be precisely as intellectually credible as evolution denial and climate denial, as the Bible clearly states that the Earth has four corners, and would help those elements in our culture hell bent on destroying any public understanding of science to further their political ends.

The Uses and Abuses of Reagan — One of Bush’s flaws is that he governed as more of a hard-line ideologue than Reagan ever pretended to be, and another is that he claimed to be an internationalist while making a mockery of America’s reputation in the world. Republicans should not be deluded into thinking that they are obliged to follow Bush’s example in order to honor Reagan, but neither should they feel compelled to respond to contemporary events as if nothing had changed in the last thirty years. Confidential to GOP in America: Want another Reagan? Elect another senile old fraud who projects a strong Daddy image. It worked for you last time.

Report: How GOP lost young voters — “In the short term, the party ought to promote the diversity of thought within its ranks and make clear that we welcome healthy debate on the policy topic at hand.” Why in the hell are you a Republican if you believe diversity of thought and healthy debate are actually good ideas? Or have you never heard any single GOP political or media figure speak, ever? And you’ve obviously never read any GOP party platform.

[culture] Further notes on the social invisibility of illness and disability

Yesterday I flew across the country wearing a face mask. This is something I’ve done several times of late. The resulting interactions are fascinating.

I’ve written before about social invisibility and mobility. Being on a scooter makes me socially invisible in a way that as a white man I’d never really experienced before. It was something between amusing and annoying, though mostly annoying.

Carrying a cane creates a more sympathetic response. Unlike the scooter, where people seem to assume I have a serious cognitive deficit, the cane (mostly) elicits courtesy at doorways and in lines and direct interactions from people.

I think the difference between the two is height. Even with the cane, my face is in an adult male position with respect to others. On a scooter, I am below the line of sight of everyone except children and people of very small stature.

But the mask… The mask creeps people out. It will come as a surprise to no one who knows me that I make a lot of eye contact with other people, especially women. When I’m wearing the mask, I encounter avoidance behaviors on a massive scale, that I rarely if ever encounter without the mask. It’s as if I’ve become creepy stalker guy. Men avoid me, but in somewhat different ways, as if I am embarrassing to them.

In other words, a lot like being back in high school.

I assume there’s a fear, spoken or unspoken, that as I am wearing a mask, there’s a chance of catching something horrible from me. It’s a marker of illness, a banner of disease. It generates not so much social invisibility as borderline pariah status. The reality in my case is that I’m trying not to catch something from the people around me, but they have no way to know that.

So, in simple terms, this is my experience of how I’ve been perceived and treated:

Scooter: Invisible and cognitively compromised
Cane: Visible and even treated with respect
Face Mask: I am the Walking Dead and I will eat your brains

Yesterday, I read a blog post where someone was describing their struggle with depression in earnest, heartbreaking detail. Then they said something I found very strange. They described cancer as a “physically evident” disease, in contrast with depression, the very clear implication being that somehow people with cancer were better off compared to people with depression.

This irritated the hell out of me, and I spent some time trying to figure out why.

It certainly wasn’t personal. The writer wasn’t trying to put me down, or cancer patients in general. I think their point was that invisible illnesses are harder for other people to understand. Which makes sense as far as it goes. I’ve said the same thing about cancer, and cannot even begin to count the number of times I’ve been told, “But you don’t look sick,” or some close variation thereof.

Except suffering is not a contest. Suffering is not a race to the bottom. It’s not a competition to see who has the worst, most unspeakable affliction.

Not to mention, many people with cancer, and I suspect most people with metastatic cancer, struggle with crippling depression right alongside their disease. As is true of most chronic and fatal illnesses, I should think. Given that depression often accompanies cancer, the idea that people with cancer somehow have it better than people with depression is a ridiculous one on the face of it.

Also, for whatever it’s worth, as I said above, cancer is also largely invisible. I’ve been ill for six years as of next month, and for most of that time, unless I was in surgical recovery or deep in the throes of chemotherapy, you couldn’t tell it by looking at me. Even then, I mostly looked like a gaunt bald guy. I could just as easily have been a meth head as a cancer patient.

These days my disease visible, but not as cancer. I get mistaken for my father’s brother, my mother’s husband, my partner’s parent, my child’s grandparent. But what I look is old, not cancerous. To the casual eye I’m 49-going-on-60something, not 49-going-on-tumorous-wretch.

I appreciate that the blogger was writing from a place of deep personal pain. But what read like an expression of envy for visible disease such as cancer was very hard for me to interpret with good will. I’ve done the chronic clinical depression thing, from my childhood into my mid-twenties, complete with suicide gestures and hospitalization. I know that world intimately from the inside. Now I’m doing the terminal cancer thing, starting at age 43 and going through an awful downward slide that has carried on for years. I know that intimately world from the inside. They don’t compare, they’re both beyond awful. One is not luckier than the other.

Really, truly, it’s not a contest. Claiming that people with some other terrible disease are better off than you is a strange form of reverse privileging. Assuming that cancer patients don’t struggle with depression as deep and crippling as chronic clinical depression is simply thoughtless. I mean, I could just as easily say, “Hey, you depressed people, with proper treatment you can lead rich, full lives, but I won’t live out the year. You have it way better than me.” Which would be about the stupidest, most pig-ignorant thing I could say to my friends who struggle with depression.

Really, truly, cancer patients do not have it better than the depressed. We’re all struggling here. We’re all suffering here.

Meet The American Pushing Homophobia in Uganda — Meet Scott Lively, the American Christian who’s globalizing the worst of conservative Bible-based hate in the name of a just and loving God, with great success. In case you’re wondering why straight people like me stand so angrily against anti-gay bigotry from American churches and politicians. This is its logical extension.

Disney ends funding to Boy Scouts over gay policy — The world really is changing. Moralistic discrimination by conservatives used to be consequence-free, and even rewarded. It still mostly is those things, but these are welcome shifts in society that will lead to a more just and moral America that better lives up to its own Constitutional promises.

Arguments Against God — I say “there is no God” with the same confidence I say “there are no ghosts” or “there is no magic.” The main issue is supernaturalism — I deny that there are beings or phenomena outside the scope of natural law. That’s not to say that I think everything is within the scope of human knowledge. Surely there are things not dreamt of in our philosophy, not to mention in our science – but that fact is not a reason to believe in supernatural beings.

The fallout from flouting international law — It’s very hard as an American to righteously defend the precepts on International Law with respect to national sovereignty after what we did just 11 years ago in Iraq. I feel like an idiot saying it out loud to anyone and am embarrassed to see John Kerry shaking his fist and proclaiming the illegality and illegitimacy of Russia’s actions when he personally voted for that illegitimate and illegal invasion. The Iraq War was never anything but a conservative project to launch a war of choice under knowingly false pretenses. And the Republicans really did abrogate America’s diplomatic legitimacy in pursuing that morally vile course. Sadly, neither the political establishment nor Your Liberal Media is likely to acknowledge this now, as it embarrasses many currently powerful people on both sides of the aisle.

Rush Limbaugh weighs in — No, not on Ukraine or even the Oscars. On Michelle Obama’s weight. Ah, the leading voice of conservative media, guiding light of millions of Republicans, with his usual thoughtful, nuanced approach to the critical issues of our era. Stay classy, conservative America. It’s what you do best.

[links] Link salad waves good-bye to Lisa

In Kentucky, a Family at the Center of the Earth — Jerry Bransford remembers the short day trips his family used to make to Mammoth Cave, half an hour away from their home in Glasgow, Ky. His father would tell him stories about how his family first came to know the cave as slaves but eventually became famous guides, starting a legacy that would last four generations.

Should AGs Ignore Laws They Don’t Like? — I was living in Virginia in 2006, know one of the sponsors of the ban on gay marriage, and fully understand – as you do much better than I – the bigotry and discriminatory intent behind that and these other state constitutional amendments. In fact, it is entirely possible that the sheer number of these referendums and the animus behind them exposed to the vast majority of straight Americans, who may not have thought that much about their impact on real people. Over time, I think straight Americans who voted against gay marriage came to see that they were aiding and abetting bullies and hurting real people.

Paralyzed GOP Lawmaker On Medicaid Opposes Medicaid Expansion — Meet the paralyzed Arkansas state Rep. who is voting against Medicaid expansion even though he has received more than $1 million of Medicaid funded hospitalization and rehabilitation and continues to be on Medicaid. He’s says the potential new recipients don’t work hard enough and probably just want to abuse prescription drugs.

Settled Science — 1 in 4 Americans isn’t down with heliocentricity. Because science is a cult, man. Where the priesthood of knowledge doesn’t permit alternative views. Your opinion is just as valid as some longhair Ph.D. who’s spent decades in research. Right?

5 years later, here’s how the tea party changed politics — For better or worse, the coming together of frustrated conservatives fearing American ruin due to rising debt has altered the national discussion to raise the profile of people and policies previously relegated to the right-wing fringe. That’s an awfully kind description of a political movement far better characterized by its arrant racism and proud, willful ignorance. Because really, if these people were motivated by deficit issues, where the hell were they when a white conservative named George W. Bush held office and ran up the highest deficits in history? They didn’t get mad until there was a black Democrat to blame. A GOP astroturf operations from the beginning, the Tea Party has never had a shred of intellectual or political credibility except as gifted to them by Your Liberal Media.